Go to www.tigerdirect.com. External dvd burners from $159. to $350. The $350. one is a Plextor which are suppose to be very good. Jerry
I've been using the Sony DRX-510UL drive for about 2 months and I like it. Its a brick, high quality parts and durable for mobile users. It supports all the media formats, DVD -/+ R, DVD -/+ RW and more. It has both USB 2.0/1.1 and Firewire support. Use the firewire interface if you can, its faster than USB. Its dirt simple to install and supports all Windows/MAC OSes. Don't forget to set the drive letter for the burner higher than any other logical drives or you'll get drive letter changes when the drive is turned off or not plugged in. I paid $299 but I now see the price has dropped significantly, like around $200. If you buy a cheap DVD burner you will get what you pay for. Bundled software is just so so, only install what you actually need and don't use DLA as it can interfere with media authoring software like "Sonic Foundary Vegas plus DVD Architect", which I recommend if you have the money. If you want to go real cheap on software use Microsoft Windows Media 9. The latest version is free and actually useful for DVD Authoring, for a change. There is yet another new Sony DVD burner that is fully 8x write capable but you can get 8x on the 510 using Sony DSS utility and the latest driver 1.0d. Plus 8x discs are expensive and 4x is fast enough. I burn full discs at "DVD standard" in 30 minutes, without DSS acceleration.
